Later that day Umm Azmi takes me to meet Umm Tamim. Her home is a wood and corrugated iron shack, meticulously neat. She's a 'black bedouin' originally from a village near Safed. Her father still lives there, and visits to her family provide her with a respectable reason for travel at feast times. She has two teen-age daughters who look after the home while she's away. Her brothers send her money in recognition of the fact that she didn't receive any schooling. A sister is a trained nurse and lives in Nazareth. All these assets set her in a superior relationship to her husband -- I notice that she doesn't ask his permission to record with me. He retires huffily to sit in the yard. She tells me that he was an orphan and badly treated as a child. This affected his personality. At the end of the recording we chat. Umm Tamim tells me that Rahat is inferior to Lakiya in terms of social services. This is because Taleb al-Sanaa (the Knesset deputy for Lakiya) works for his people. Suddenly her husband appears in the doorway with a thunderous face, shouting at her not to bring in politics. Umm Tamim tells me not to pay any attention to him, he's a coward.

Umm Tamim begins speaking:
"My mother's life was very hard... She was raised as an orphan. She was brought up by her uncle. She had to do the harvesting. She suffered, the poor one.

Then they moved, they left this area, they went from Aragid (?) to Gaza on foot. (What happened to your father?) My father is alive. Him too, he didn't have money to eat. He used to go and harvest for people to bring food for his children. They gave him wheat, and they ground it to give their children. (You're talking about 1948?) Yes, 1948, before I was born. My brother was with her, and she was pregnant. She went from Umm al-Ramali to Gaza on foot. My father also went walking. With my mother. Both of them went on foot. There were people with camels who took others and showed them the way...What did she cook for my brother? She cooked him a bit of 'jreeshi' and a bit of lentils. Yallah! Even that was hard to find to feed the little children. (She had only one?) Yes, just one, my older brother. Then they lived in a mud house, a house made of mud. They made it with their own hands. They made a mixing mound, they smoothed the mud, and the roof was made of straw. They smoothed it and they lived in it. (Were there other houses like that near you?) Yes, there were a lot of refugees. Later the Agency started giving them supplies. They gave them flour and rice, meat, sugar - they lived on it. Later when I was maybe three years old, the Jews invaded us -- in 1956, the war between Egypt and the Jews. The Jews did ugly things to people. They'd gather men and shoot them. They'd slaughter the woman and slaughter her little son in his bed..."